Aid in Alzheimer’s Study

Using donated human brains,
researchers from the Universities of Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, and
Auckland studied the differences of protein expression between healthy human
brains and those with Alzheimer’s disease to produce the largest dataset of its
type ever, and the data is freely available online for any scientist to use.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive
form of dementia that interferes with memory, thinking, and behavior.
Alzheimer’s currently affects 36 million people worldwide with no
disease-modifying treatment available. Alzheimer’s follows distinctive development
patterns that are not replicated in animals, making it vital to study human
brains.

Scientists used the donated
brains to map more than 5,825 distinctive proteins across six regions of the
brains and showed that areas of the brain involved in functional changes in
Alzheimer’s showed the greatest changes in proteins. Thus, there is a
predictive gradient of protein changes that is associated with disease
severity.

This study allowed
researchers to observe how Alzheimer’s progresses in greater detail and
identify new molecular and protein changes that were previous not known to be
associated with the disease. By studying thousands of individual proteins, this
research has generated a detailed molecular map of changes in the brain throughout
the progression of Alzheimer’s. Making this information open source will help
others continue deepening our understanding of Alzheimer’s and identify targets
that can be used to develop therapeutics.